When language engenders gender inequality

First, my colleague Akshita Nanda
highlighted how society has different expectations of men and women
when it comes to managing work and family.

Then, in last week's issue of Urban featuring
make-up for men, editor Tee Hun Ching wrote about the differences
between what men and women could not live without.

To be sure, the battle for
equality of the sexes has made great progress over the decades. But even
today, most people will admit that much more can be done. One area that
needs to be tackled is language.

An April 16 entry on the Guardian's Mind Your
Language blog, Women And Men Are Still Unequal - Even When They Are
Dead, notes that newspapers are much more likely to use 'widow' to refer
to the wife of a dead man than to use 'widower' to refer to the husband
of a dead woman.

Various British newspapers had a ratio of
between six and 15 widow references to one widower reference in the past
year. The discrepancy is similar in this newspaper, which had 1,821
instances of 'widow' against just 273 instances of 'widower' in the past
10 years. The blogpost concludes that this variance reinforces
'outdated attitudes towards women and men'.

Admittedly, the higher frequency of 'widow'
can be explained by demographics - men, after all, have a shorter life
expectancy than women. But even in everyday speech, people are far more
likely to say 'his widow' when a man dies than to say 'her widower' when
a woman dies.

Another domain that still sees vestiges of
such antiquated attitudes is that of occupations. In the past, when each
profession was principally the preserve of one sex, people saw the need
to distinguish between a manager and a manageress, or between an author
and an authoress, and to specify a professional's sex when it was
unexpected - as in 'lady doctor' and 'male nurse'.

Mercifully, most of these awful terms have
been consigned to the dung heap of linguistic history. But a few have
overstayed their welcome. So 'actress', 'comedienne', 'stewardess' and
'waitress' still crop up in news reports.

Granted, 'actress' is convenient for naming film and theatre awards, which usually honour male and female thespians separately.

But surely the sex of someone who performs
comedies, serves passengers or waits tables can be indicated without the
involvement of such outmoded words. The English suffixes '-er', '-or'
and '-ian' are perfectly capable of denoting people of both sexes - as
any writer, editor or physician will tell you.

Finally, the use of titles such as 'Mr', 'Mrs' and 'Miss' reveals quite a bit about gender inequality in society.

The common argument is that a man gets away
with a simple 'Mr' that does not divulge his marital status, whereas
things are somewhat trickier for a woman.

Of course, the English language has provided a
way out with the title 'Ms', the feminine equivalent of 'Mr'. But here
in Singapore, as soon as a woman is married, government departments
immediately prefix the aunty-sounding 'Madam' to her maiden name, even
if she is all of 20 years old.

This use of 'Madam' as a title is decidedly
old-school and is, moreover, restricted to this region. Elsewhere in the
English-speaking world, 'Mrs' or 'Ms' is used instead. It is time the
authorities here kept abreast of linguistic developments.

On another note, this newspaper's Forum page
has the policy of appending the title 'Miss', 'Ms', 'Mrs' or 'Madam' in
brackets to a female letter writer's name - as a practical tool to help
repliers refer to letter writers correctly.

The National University of Singapore and
Nanyang Technological University had a similar practice in the past. On
their degree scrolls, female graduates used to have their names prefixed
with 'Miss' (or 'Madam', presumably, if they were married), whereas
male graduates were accorded no corresponding honour.

The universities have since done away with
titles altogether - and just as well, for both sexes should be given
equal treatment: either use titles for all or do not use them at all.

I am not advocating that we overhaul the
language to purge it of all traces of gender inequality. Some have tried
before to make bold moves that betrayed profound linguistic ignorance -
such as the coinage of the ridiculous word 'herstory' as a feminine
counterpart to 'history' - with hardly any success, thankfully.

Rather, let's use the resources that English
already has - for example, 'they' as a gender-neutral third- person
singular pronoun, which, far from being ungrammatical, actually dates
back to the 16th century and is now becoming increasingly common.

Gender differences will always remain, even in
language. But we can each do our part to be careful in our choice of
words and phrases so that we do not sideline either gender - or any
other group in society, for that matter.